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PARTISAN REVIEW
interfaith meetings-and in an election year!-understand that there are
only two principles?-terror and joy." That the logic of such a position is,
to say the least, weak, is self evident. That it owes its rhetoric to Nietzsche
is also evident. Rosenfeld , suddenly confronted by the upwelling of a politi–
cal horror that had become a personal, psychological property, recoiled by
becoming, briefly, a Nietzschean spokesman for' 'terror beyond evil and joy
beyond good, " declaring that' 'that is all there is to work with, whether we
are to understand what has happened, or to begin all over again. "
In a subsequent
Partisan Review
essay, "The Meaning of the Terror,"
Rosenfeld came out from behind the reviewer's desk and broadcast a mani–
festo on the moral imperatives of the new age, proclaiming that the holo–
caust was the signal for a new moral dispensation in the West and calling
upon modern man, full in the knowledge of terror, to now learn the shudder
of ecstasy. "Our joy will be in love and restoration, in the sensing of human–
ity as the concrete thing, the datum of our cultural existence.
It
will lie in
the creation of a new capacity, proof against terror, to experience our natural
life to the full ." Stirring words that , not unexpectedly, fail to stir . There was
something wrong here , a note of impatient declamation that rendered the
whole exercise unconvincing, even comical. Too much terror was being
denied and too much abstract, hypothetical joy summoned from too deep
an abyss; the terror was real enough but the joy was little more than an
aphoristic vehicle, unreal, ahistorical, and impersonal. Needless to add, this
invalidation of all traditional ethics and the making of a new morality in a
mere thousand words, was an exercise in rope dancing that not even
such
an
expert in concentration could bring off. Western culture was not Rosenfeld 's
field and he was always on surer ground when he scaled his vision to human
proportions-to the individual and the specific. The idea that joy could be
brought out of terror, which is mere desperate posturing at the level of
"Western Man," could, for example, yield trenchant analysis at the level of
the single book or author.
Thus it was that George Otwell earned Rosenfeld 's praise for his accom–
plishment in writing 1984, when, at the door of death, he confronted the
horror that totalitarian politics bred in him and snatched a grace beyond the
reach of English decency and fair-mindedness . What was achieved in 1984
was the double revelation to Winston Smith in the extremity of torture that
"the objective of power is power" and that he, at the end , "loved big
brother. " For Rosenfeld, that last realization was the secret of totalitarianism,
its power to invade the minds of its victims and become their conscience and
arbiter of their wills. Rosenfeld was greatly moved by Btuno Bettelheirn's
account of the victims' behavior in the camps, the regressions to childhood
among the imprisoned that held them divided against each other and ren-
